Andreas Schulze

Nebel im Wohnzimmer

March 6th - May 17th 2015, Kunstmuseum

The Berlin-based painter Gunter Reski once said of Andreas Schulze that he considered him the world’s best painter of peas. Born in 1955 in Hanover, Schulze, who lives in the Rhineland area, belongs to the generation of artists who counter the utopias of modernism with ironic skepticism. After over twenty years, Andreas Schulze will once again be the subject of a comprehensive solo exhibition at a Swiss museum.

Since the 1980s, the artist has developed a highly idiosyncratic oeuvre in which familiar things such as vases, furniture, and even the aforementioned peas develop an absurd artistic life of their own due to the fact that the artist surprisingly depicts them in unusual contexts. At the same time, he makes a winking reference to the heroic strategies of modernism by playfully counteracting Donald Judd’s notorious cubes in the form of cabinets. In the subject matter of his work, Schulze harks back to the “stuffy, snazzy humorousness of the sixties” (Reski), the feeling of bourgeois coziness that he counters with a finely balanced attitude between decorative satire and subversive explosive power in the conceptual. In the process, he creates a Dadaist distorted mirror for our modern-day society as an “art of the furnishing of an unidentifiable in-between.” (Dickerhoff)

The exhibition was organized in international cooperation with the Villa Merkel in Esslingen and the Kunstmuseum Bonn.